Spoilers Ahead!
Before I read the book, I had always understood Lolita to be a sexually precocious teenage girl who seduces an older man.

In this scenario, Humbert is technically guilty but it’s still possible to have a little sympathy for him. It’s only our prudish modern society that frowns on sexual relationships between middle aged men and teenage girls. In classical times, they were celebrated as the very pinnacle of erotic love. Humbert was just unlucky enough to be born in the wrong era.

But Nabokov makes it very clear that this interpretation is absolutely mistaken.

Humbert himself, as narrator, describes how he is sexually attracted only to very young girls who have not reached puberty. It’s only in his perverted imagination that Lolita flirts back (she was asking for it, yer honour). Lolita is twelve.

During Lolita’s long imprisonment as Humbert’s sex slave, he rapes her repeatedly while persuading himself (and, in his role as narrator) the reader that Lolita is a willing and equal partner. When she refuses some of his more depraved advances, he bribes her by raising her allowance to two dollars (and later steals it back).

Lolita, the book, is a tale of child abuse, plain and simple and Nabokov makes no apologies for that. The story has no moral value and no moral lessons for the reader. It’s almost as though Nabokov is saying “Look! I am such an awesome writer, I can write this book about paedophilia and you’ll still enjoy it.”

I didn’t enjoy it.

A sucker for punishment, I watched the movie last night.

Jeremy Irons’ Humbert was still a depraved pervert but his Lolita was a more willing partner and much further into puberty than the girl in the book. It was easier to feel a little sympathy for this monster. The movie made it almost seem like a tragic story of forbidden love.

Maybe it’s the difficulty of reproducing the unreliable narrator device on film – or maybe it’s just harder to portray child abuse – but I feel that the movie betrayed the premise of the book in a pervion as depraved as Humbert’s. If the movie Lolita were as young as the book Lolita, there would have been outrage – as, I assume, the author probably intended.

The blog where I snagged the book cover captures the issue succinctly by comparing the various covers that have graced the book over the years.

Which of these books is about a man who preys on little girls?.

I think you’ll agree, it’s this one:

Sting may have struggled to resist the girl who stood too close, but the famous book by Nabokov is about a pervert.

Whenever we hear a story about someone who has suffered a tragedy or illness that leaves them in  a bad way physically, we have that conversation. The one that goes “I wouldn’t want to live that way. Just have me put down.” I always have the same response: as long as I can still think, I will want to go on.

And if I can’t think? I’ll go on anyway because a) I have nothing to lose (I can’t think, remember?) and 2) How do you know I can’t think? Maybe I really can think but just can’t communicate what I am thinking?

I expect the state of Ebert’s face leaves a lot of people thinking “I wouldn’t want to live like that” but those people are missing the most beautiful part of Roger Ebert. He is absolutely one of the most powerful writers on the planet and I feel privileged that I can read his blog every now and again (but cheated that I only discovered it in the last couple of years).

Even when Ebert is writing about something as trivial as a movie, his words are magnificent but he rarely stays on topic long enough to merit the lowly title of movie critic. More often he writes about himself – which is to say, he writes about me. He wields his pen like a time machine transporting me magically into my memories. To memories of burning shame – or burning pride – or of quiet moments of reflection that repeat, reprise and return.

Today, Ebert started with the madness in Arizona but he was soon telling me about that time a bunch of midshipmen from Dartmouth drove down to Torquay with our consorts from Stover Girls School – me with the blackest girl i ever kissed  – and reminding me how it’s a mistake, if your grass skirt is homemade, to go commando.

But his important topic for today was how the deepest lesson you must learn, as you metamorphose from child to man, is to learn to imagine what it is like to be someone else.

Ebert’s example, as always, is mine.

That brings me back around to the story of the school mural. I began up above by imagining I was a student in Prescott, Arizona, with my face being painted over. That was easy for me. What I cannot imagine is what it would be like to be one of those people driving past in their cars day after day and screaming hateful things out of the window. How do you get to that place in your life?

I often wondered, seeing pictures of those brave first students who calmly smashed through the racial barricades in Little Rock, what was it like to be those people?

Not Elizabeth Eckford. It’s easy to imagine being her – just like it’s easy to imagine being Neil Armstrong making his giant leap for mankind, or Geoff Hurst making sure it really is all over now.

What was it like to be the girl behind her with so much hatred for someone she does not even know?

What was it like to be that guy who was so offended by the idea of black people and white people eating lunch together that he poured his drink over them?

What is it like to be so afraid of catholic school children walking on protestant streets that you need to throw bricks at them?

Ebert:

But what about the people in those cars? They don’t breathe that air. They don’t think of the feelings of the kids on the mural. They don’t like those kids in the school. It’s not as if they have reasons. They simply hate. Why would they do that? What have they shut down inside? Why do they resent the rights of others? Our rights must come first before our fears. And our rights are their rights, whoever “they” are.

Ebert’s story starts with the town in Arizona that commissioned a mural for their elementary school and then made the artist lighten the faces after a local politician complained on the radio. It ends long ago with a story from his own life.

One day in high school study hall, a Negro girl walked in who had dyed her hair a lighter brown. Laughter spread through the room. We had never, ever, seen that done before. It was unexpected, a surprise, and our laughter was partly an expression of nervousness and uncertainty. I don’t think we wanted to be cruel. But we had our ideas about Negroes, and her hair didn’t fit. Think of her. She wanted to try her hair a lighter brown, and perhaps her mother and sisters helped her, and she was told she looked pretty, and then she went to school and we laughed at her. I wonder if she has ever forgotten that day. God damn it, how did we make her feel? We have to make this country a place where no one needs to feel that way.

John Newcaso was the first black kid I knew and I am happy to count him among my 7 year old friends. If my memory serves me well, he was an orphan and newly arrived from Africa. He was very popular (perhaps because he was the only one who could throw two punches in a second – hey! We were seven! – or because he held the record for longest flight for a paper aeroplane even after we all copied his design) but we made fun of him because he wore a brace on his legs.

I wonder how he remembers us?

Was his first year in cold, dreary England tremendous fun because he had so many friends and lashings and lashings of ginger beer? Or hell because of our relentless teasing? Or maybe it was just my memory cleaning up the darker corners? I hope not.

My daughter’s favourite philosophy problem…

Time after time, since I first discovered him writing a column in Section P (Arts and Leisure) of the New York Times, Frank Rich has surprised and delighted me but today he surprised and disappointed me.

As always, he has woven a glorious narrative knitting far flung ideas around a familiar but unlikely concept. Today’s concept is the idea that America likes to create mythic figures out of malevolent schemers and the dishonest schemes that they create. The malevolent schemer who prompted today’s rambling magnificence is Tiger Woods.

I have so far managed to avoid finding out what Tiger did because, as far as I know, it is a private thing and none of my business [if I made mistake and it really is something that concerns me, please let me know and I'll go investigate and revise this rant - ed] so I don’t quite see what Tigers travails has to do with the rest of Rich’s otherwise excellent tour of the schemes and schemers who have so blighted the decade.

Back when Rich was still the NY Times’s drama critic, he managed to cover a lot of ground that the main editorial section was afraid to touch. He called bullshit on the weapons of mass destruction story that was running on the front page and that got the NYT in so much trouble (and the author in prison); he was against the Iraq war when the paper’s official position was that maybe we should slow down and think about this a little more.

If the pen is mighter than the sword, imagine how mighty you’d be writing with a sword dipped in ink. Well, Rich uses a machete and wields it in the direction of the greatest villains of our time. There were days in 2003 when it seemed like only Jon Stewart and Frank Rich were unafraid to say out loud what everyone else whispered in secret and the craven cowards of the NY Times editorial board merely suggested that they were somewhat unhappy with the situation in Iraq.

I can only imagine what it must have been like to be the editor of the Art Section when Rich’s latest column dropped in your inbox. Er… Frank, this stuff about Yellowcake Uranium is great but you know that Andrew Lloyd-Weber has anew show opening on Monday?

So. I really like Frank Rich. I think he is an American hero. But he is supposed to be going after the hard targets, not golfers who are having wife troubles.

Back in the days of my youth, Daley Thompson was a Great British Hero. He had displayed the same effortless transcendence as Tiger and, like Tiger, he excelled at his sport (the Decathlon). I remember him having a run in with the press for some stupid thing (that I don’t remember) and I remember thinking that he had a certain power in his hands. If Daley were to make the nasty, crawling British Press an offer…

You can have my public life but leave my private life alone…or…it’s all over and I quit. Your choice. Choose now.

He could have driven a spear into the heart of the beast from which it would never recover. I wish there were a way for Tiger to do the same.

Maybe he could call Daley and they could work on it together?

Stuart Jeffries, in the Guardian, teaches us some economics about the Joy Of Giving.

deadweight loss: losses to one person that are not offset by the gains to someone else. Waldfogel estimates the global deadweight loss of Christmas 2006 to be more than $25bn (about £15bn).

All too many of us are destroying value when we buy presents. “People’s own choices generate 18% more satisfaction – per dollar spent – than do gifts,” he says. It is an orgy of wealth destruction, and in recession that’s one of the last things we need.

We have always tried to teach our children how wasteful gift-giving is but, according to his helpful new book  Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays,

economics professor Joel Waldfogel argues that there are three justifiable economic reasons for giving people gifts. They are:

1. Redistribution You are Robin Hood in an inegalitarian world. This is why, in the name of maximising utility, it’s OK to nick cases of Puligny-Montrachet from your boss’s house and hand them out at soup kitchens (but only to those who you’re sure aren’t alcoholics).
2. Paternalism Your daughter needs a hat. There’s no way she’ll ever buy one herself, so you get it. Then she loses it on the bus. So you have to buy her another, which she moans about for being itchy. Nobody said Christmas was going to be easy.
3. Altruism We try to make the recipient as satisfied as possible by getting them stuff they’d like. This only happens in your dreams or to my brother Neil who, now I think about it, is really good at buying presents, damn him.

We live less than 1/2 a mile and two tiny streets away from the 9 year old’s school and she asked if it would be OK for her to walk to school on her own. I asked The Google what is the current thinking on 9 year olds walking to school? and was shocked by what it told me.

I expected to find mixed opinions – a few people fondly remembering how they walked a couple of miles across a field when they were five; some others wondering whether it may be too dangerous in this day and age; a pragmatic smattering suggesting that it depend on the maturity of your child but…nope. The People on the Internet were unamimous.

IF YOU LET A NINE YEAR WALK TO SCHOOL SHE WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY BE MURDERED AND IT WILL BE ALL YOUR FAULT YOU HEARTLESS BASTARD!!! PEOPLE LIKE YOU SHOULD BE LOCKED UP!!!

Here’s a civic dilemma for you.

Santa Clara wanted to set aside some open space for recreation and the general enjoyment of the people and put an initiative on the ballot to raise the funds. It passed.

But the California Supreme Court decided that the $20 a year per property tax payer constituted a tax rather than a fee. Taxes require a 2/3 majority. Fees only require a simple majority. It ruled the tax illegal.

What to do with the money that they have already raised for open spaces (about $130 total per household)?

A group who call themselves Taxpayers of Santa Clara sued and won a class action ruling that the county had to return the money – after deducting the $7m in lawyers fees (plus sundry other administration costs). I got my letter today.

If I fill in the form, I get my share of the bounty and the Open Spaces Authority fires a few park rangers and probably closes some parks.

In a taxpayer revolt – and a reversal of the usual situation – many taxpayers are refusing to claim their refund to

• Protest the frivolous lawsuit
• Show Taxpayers of Santa Clara that they do not represent us
• And to announce that we rather like open spaces and would like to fund them

Dear Santa Clara,

You can keep my $130.

Dear Taxpayers of Santa Clara,

You suck.

Dear Tony Tanke of Davis (who represented the Taxpayer of Santa Clara),

Enjoy your $7.4 million.

You suck too.

Ragged Clown

My mistake. It wasn’t a dilemma at all.

I read about america’s worst mom when she became famous last year. She has a book out.

The media dubbed me “America’s Worst Mom.” (Go ahead—Google it.) But that’s not what I am.

I really think I’m a parent who is afraid of some things (bears, cars) and less afraid of others (subways, strangers). But mostly I’m afraid that I, too, have been swept up in the impossible obsession of our era: total safety for our children every second of every day. The idea that we should provide it and actually could provide it. It’s as if we don’t believe in fate anymore, or good luck or bad luck. No, it’s all up to us.

Childhood really has changed since today’s parents were kids, and not just in the United States. Australian children get stared at when they ride the bus alone. Canadian kids stay inside playing video­games. After I started a blog called Free Range Kids, I heard from a dad in Ireland who lets his 11-year-old play in the local park, unsupervised, and now a mom down the street won’t let her son go to their house. She thinks the dad is reckless.

What has changed in the English-speaking world that has made childhood independence taboo? The ground has not gradually gotten harder under the jungle gym. The bus stops have not crept farther from home. Crime is actually lower than it was when most of us were growing up. So there is no reality-based reason that children today should be treated as more helpless and vulnerable than we were when we were young.

If this is America’s worst mom, I had the worst mum in England. She made fun of me because I wouldn’t take a two mile bus ride to the doctor’s on my own when I was 10.

Lucky it wasn’t america because the police would’ve nabbed me.

I have to be honest, though: I write all this in a kind of shaky mood because I just got a call from the police. This morning, I put Izzy, now 10, on a half-hour train ride out to his friend’s house. It sounds like I’m a recidivist, but really: His friend’s family was waiting at the other end to pick him up, and he’s done this a dozen times already. It is a straight shot on a commuter railroad. This particular time, however, the conductor found it outrageous that a 10-year-old should be traveling alone, and summoned the police, who arrived as my son disembarked.

A couple of years ago an older couple accosted me in The Good Guys because I had left my kids watching the big screen TVs while I looked for a stereo. Who knows who might’ve snatched my urchins away in the 4 minutes that they were alone.

But…

Mostly, the world is safe. Mostly, people are good. To emphasize the opposite is to live in the world of tabloid TV. A world filled with worst-case scenarios, not the world we actually live in, which is factually, statistically, and, luckily for us, one of the safest periods for children in the history of the world.

Like the housewives of the 1950s, today’s children need to be liberated. Unlike the housewives of the ’50s, the children can’t do it themselves. Though I’d love to see hordes of kids gathering for meetings, staging protests, and burning their baby kneepads—and maybe they will—it is really up to us parents to start renormalizing childhood. That begins with us realizing how scared we’ve gotten, even of ridiculously remote dangers.

Locking children away is cruel.

Be free, little children! Be free!

This one might get me in trouble despite my best efforts to not offend.Sorry in advance.

If you read as many conservative blogs as I do, you may have seen the celebrations over the latest Gallup poll.

David Frum has a theory about that poll.

Charles Franklin of Pollster.com explains the poll’s big technical error. Gallup oversampled Republicans. At a time when only 1 in 5 Americans identifies as Republican, 32 percent of the respondents in Gallup’s survey group identified themselves as Republican.

[snip]

As the Republican Party shrinks, it becomes more conservative. Today’s shriveled GOP is much more pro-life than the robust GOP of years past. So if you oversample Republicans, you are oversampling pro-lifers. Sure enough, when you look at Gallup’s breakdown of its results, all the rise in anti-abortion feeling is concentrated among self-identified Republicans.

More interesting to me though is his analysis that

…Gallup’s poll is wrong in a far more important way. For all their vehement disagreement, pro-lifers and pro-choicers agree that the abortion debate is about rights: the woman’s right to choose, the unborn child’s right to life. Pro-choicers may sternly disapprove of the irresponsible woman who casually discards one pregnancy after another. Pro-lifers may feel tremendous sympathy for the woman considering abortion because she feels she cannot raise a child on her own. Both agree that the reason for the abortion is absolutely irrelevant.

The 55% of us who are neither absolutely pro-life or pro-choice (or both! Choose life!) frame it a little differently.

Frum talks through a couple of scenarios in the grey area

“Suppose a woman has two boyfriends at the same time, gets pregnant, and wants an abortion so she won’t have to admit to her two-timing. Is that okay?”

“Now suppose another woman is working her way through college. Her boyfriend dumps her when she tells him she’s pregnant. If she carries the baby, she’ll have to drop out and take any job she can find in this tough economy. She has decided abortion is her best choice—should the government stop her?”

but I am too much of a coward to go there so I’ll switch to an analogy.

The Straight Dope has a fascinating discussion about the ethics surrounding peeing in public places. Pretty much everyone agrees that peeing in public places is wrong…but sometimes it’s the least wrong option.

But it’s hard to encode that kind of moral calculus into law. The law wants things to be completely legal or completely illegal while morality is rarely so black and white.

And when the law does try address complex moral issues it ends up in tying itself up in knots – it’s illegal to pee in public unless you are with your mother, are under three and can’t make it to MacDonalds …or it’s after nightfall and there is a tree and no cars are passing by for at least 20 seconds.

How much better would the legal system be if there were a class of professionals trained in the law but given the discretion to judge whether something, though technically illegal, was merited because of extenuating circumstances (Jeff has suggested a name for this class of professionals – judgers).

My analogy breaks down though because we already have a class of professionals that is more than adequately equipped to make this kind of judgment in the case of abortion. They are called doctors. The law has nothing to add.